Reviews by Mike Russo

Folks remember Indigo Prophecy, right? It was Quantic Dream’s breakthrough game, a studio which later gained even more attention for Heavy Rain, Detroit: Become Human, and Being a Complete Garbage Fire of a Workplace. But going back to the beginning, Indigo Prophecy was cool because it immersed the player in an immediately-gripping mystery, with your protagonist waking up from a dissociative event to realize they’d just murdered someone; starting from your desperate attempts to cover your tracks, the story allowed you to slowly peel back the layers of a sinister conspiracy, with clues to the true nature of what was going on always remaining elusively out of reach.

Then you got to the midpoint of the game, the developers ran out of money and/or ideas, and the back half of the narrative saw your everyman protagonist develop superpowers and win a three-way kung-fu struggle against a Mayan human-sacrifice cult and the physical personification of the internet.

Even leaving aside the let’s-just-say-problematic elements here, a fundamental problem is that nobody who enjoyed the low-key, street-level mystery the opening promised wanted what the second half of the game was offering. Frustrating player’s expectations can lead to exciting twists if it’s done right, but yank the rug too much, and folks will check out even if the individual elements are sound, is the lesson.

The connection here is that while Super Mega Tournament Arc! seems to promise one kind of story, from its blurb, NES-style graphics, and enthusiastic title, it winds up delivering something quite different – actually, two or three things. And while there’s some good writing and individually engaging pieces, I felt like the whole was less than the sum of its parts; as the ending kept escalating and throwing more and more narrative shocks, I found myself wishing to rewind time and go back to when this was just the story of a simple gladiator-cyborg fighting their way to the top.

That opening part of the game is I think the most effective. It’s a little slow-paced, as the first-act training sequence stretches on for a while, but the storytelling is effective, as the backstory for your plucky fighter is gradually revealed, you pick practice options to determine your style in the ring (choosing between lawful, entrepreneurial, and individualistic – more or less relying on discipline, scrappiness, and defiance, respectively), and your lovable-stereotype trainer helps you figure out what’s what. True, there’s a jarring moment where a white-cloaked patron shows up and drops some mystery on you, as well as gifting you a weird death mask, but on the whole the sports-movie cliches hit their beats well. The prose here, and throughout the game, is solid, though never quite as over the top as the exclamation-marked title made me expect – I think it’s down to personal taste whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, though I thought it fit the unexpectedly low-key vibe.

The second act sees you thrust into the arena, running through a series of fights against colorfully-costumed competitors. I don’t think it’s possible to lose, but each bout is dramatic, and escalates the challenge and the stakes; the exact approach you take to win also depends heavily on the choices you make during training, which gives the first act a pleasing retrospective weight. Again, it’s maybe a little long – six fights is a lot – but I was jazzed to see where the climax was headed.

The third act is where things went off the rails for me, though. I’m going to spoiler-block the specifics, but suffice to say the story makes a hard left into a very different genre. (Spoiler - click to show)Rather than a cyberpunk sports movie, it turns out you’re in a Norse-themed superhero one, as the patron uses magical artifacts of the Aesir to defeat the mob boss who organized the tournament, take their ring which is literally Draupnir from Norse myth, and then threatens to use it to bring about Ragnarok. The issues here aren’t confined to genre coherence, though: the mysterious patron also takes over the narrative, in the way that an annoying GMPC can sideline the player characters in a tabletop RPG session. There are also some fourth-wall-breaking shenanigans that similarly feel like they come out of nowhere in a game that hadn’t been especially meta to that point.

Eventually the good guys win, and the story gets around to circling back to the personal stakes that motivated your character to enter the arena at the first place, but by that point I had a hard time feeling engaged; I felt like the protagonist’s struggles, their relationship with their family, and the close dynamic they’d built with their trainer had been too thoroughly revealed as unimportant to what the story was actually about, so this was too little, too late. I’d definitely play enough game by this author because the fundamentals of each act are strong – to say nothing of the cool pixel art – I just hope they tone down their imagination next time and recognize when less is more!

Immediately after playing Hypercubic Time-Warp All-go-rhythmic Synchrony, I came across another game with challenging bleed-through between art and artist: A Single Ouroboros Scale is primarily an archive of the Jots (lightly-fictionalized tweets) of IF author Algie Freyir, who has many overt similarities to IF author Naomi Norbez (who goes by Bez), who wrote SOS. Fittingly for a protagonist named after the eponymous mouse in Flowers for Algernon, Algie’s latest Jots show him struggling with rapidly-decaying mental faculties, including a failing memory; per the author’s notes, this affliction is also affecting Bez, meaning that Algie’s desperate attempts to assess and even safeguard his legacy take on a terrifying, poignant power, since none of this is theoretical.

The frame here is reminiscent of that used in one of Bez’s previous games, the Dead Account – the protagonist is a nameless volunteer trying out for a place with an archiving project that’s maintaining a backup of the IF community’s Jots since the main site has closed down. Rather than preserving information, though, the project director – your potential boss – seems more intent on destroying it by imposing a significance test on posters, and deleting the Jots of those who fail it. The business of the game, then, has you reviewing 8 years of Algie’s Jots and then facing the binary choice of whether or not his account, which is framed as being low-rated, should be deleted.

This of course doesn’t make much logical sense – how does someone who believes in restrictive curation wind up in charge of an archiving project, especially when the deletion can save at most a few thousand words of text (he also misgenders Algie in the final sequence, cementing his status as a villain)? The stakes of this decision for the notional protagonist are also quite low – there’s a suggestion that joining the project will somewhat enhance their standing in the IF community, but that’s pretty thin gruel. But this setup is very effective as to Algie, as this record of his participation in the community is threatened with oblivion – and while in theory his games would survive on whatever the fictional IFDB analogue is, of course all we see of him are his Jots meaning the stakes feel total. And while it’s hard to imagine any good-faith player sincerely picking the “delete” option at the end, putting the player in a position to make such a decision works very well to implicate them in the processes by which the IF community determines who is and isn’t worthy of remembrance.

Overall though this layer is relatively thin, and the main action of the game involves reading, and reacting to, Algie’s Jots. And on these terms the game definitely needs to be judged a success, because I think most players will have many, strong reactions to the Jots. Many of them are very personal, charting Algie’s journey towards understanding and embracing his trans identity and falling away from his Christian faith. Descriptions of the games he’s working on, his influences, and artistic aspirations are also really compelling, enlivened by repeated allusions to two poems – an Emily Dickinson one about the miraculous and weighty responsibilities of being a flower, and one by Rebecca Elson about dark matter but also touching on death and the possibility of resurrection. And of course there are the heart-rending final ones charting Algie’s despair as his mind disintegrates. There are some good funny bits along the way, too, despite the darkness of the game’s progression – Algie’s response to folks telling him to stop talking about personal stuff so much is that he’s “gonna complain about parsers SO much and SO many of you are gonna be pissed,” which made me laugh.

The main subject, though, is the IF community, and the trajectory of Algie’s attitude towards it shifting from one of bright-eyed excitement at finding a set of fellow-artists and a potential audience for his writing, through gradual disillusionment as his games are ignored or met with patronizing uninterest from most of the community, through desperate, vituperative anger at the prospect that his work will be forgotten and these years of engagement will produce no legacy. From the specificity here, as well as the out-of-game author’s notes, it’s clear we’re meant to engage with these critiques not just according to the fictional frame where they chart out a tragic character arc, but also reflect on what they say about the real-world, Jot-free IF community.

This is an important goal, and I do think many of the criticisms land – and probably would land with even more force if I’d been around during the bad old days of the Twine Wars. Still, I think embedding them in the fictional construct of SOS undercuts the power of many of these arguments, and can make them sometimes frustrating. We’re only able to see one side of the conversations, and Algie’s complaints are sometimes vague and hard to connect with real-world people, incidents, and behaviors – this is understandable given the fictionalized, in-character nature of the Jots, as well as by a laudable desire not to call out specific people, but I found it put the arguments in something of an uncanny valley, too real to appreciate solely within the game’s made-up world but too far afield from reality to be conducive to concrete, specific action. For example, the project director’s dismissal of Algie, and folks working in hypertext in general, is really slippery:

"You know, keeping creators whose work are more relevant to the growth of the IF scene. Offshoots are ok, too experimental not as much. We’re also leaning more towards parsers, considering how important they are to the community, compared to the hypertext stuff going on outside of the main IF circles. Nothing against hypertext obviously, but I just haven’t seen much development there compared to parsers, and neither has the community."

“Growth”, “offshoots”, “too experimental”, “important”, “development” – these important words aren’t elaborated on or defined, nor am I finding it easy to map them to critical conversations I’ve personally seen. There’s also a Manichean view of the community as either “parser” or “hypertext/Twine”, which doesn’t take account of a contemporary scene where many players, and even authors, move between them – though much of this seems to me as about importing parser sensibilities into choice-based frameworks, which per SOS’s values might be seen as a colonizing or at least tokenizing development. And similarly, it’s hard not to see Algie’s blunt dismissal of parser games (“I don’t get it but you do you I guess? Like I said, never liked them very much… But you do you and I’ll do me”) as symmetric with the disinterest with which others greet his work – of course there’s nothing unfair about saying responsibilities look different for less marginalized vs. more marginalized members of a community, but this subtlety isn’t pulled out in the game.

Again, for a fictionalized polemic, this is completely understandable, even notwithstanding the constraining circumstances Bez’s medical condition has had on the game’s composition. And he’s also clear that these arguments can be taken in different ways, and is primarily focused on generating, rather than resolving, discussion – in the final notes, he says:

"The JAVP and Robert Evans’s vision/execution could be an “IF dystopia” as one beta tester put it, or an alternate future closer to our reality—up to you, but I do want to raise the question of how IF history is remembered/recorded."

I have to say, even after all these caveats, sometimes I did feel annoyed and thought SOS was taking some cheap shots. It’s hard to ignore the fact that I’m one of the cisgendered, straight, white, middle-aged, male parser authors who are the clearly-signposted bad guys here, so it is not entirely outside the realm of possibility that rather than being a completely disinterested and fair reader, my feeling that these critiques aren’t fully relevant and persuasive are biased by some defensiveness. I haven’t seen too many reviews of SOS out in the wild and the ones I have are generally from folks with backgrounds apparently similar to my own; I’m very eager to see what others coming at it from a different perspective might think of the game.

Wrapping up by going back to Algie, though, there’s definitely self-awareness and clarity on some of the tensions inherent to his desires, especially in the really well-written final sequence of Jots. Here he reflects on the contradiction that gives SOS its title:

"Does anybody ever die satisfied? I’m pretty sure no matter how successful you are or big you get, you got loose ends SOMEWHERE. And that’s kinda reassuring? But I also feel like I gotta die “right”/“well”, y’know? Which means seeking satisfaction there. But I won’t be satisfied. But I keep trying. Endless ouroboros.

"And I’lll be replaced. I know that. Once I stop making stuff or die somebody’s gonna pick up where I left off and take over. The internet’s full of people clamoring for attention on their work, including me. And I’m replaceable by any of them."

Both pieces of this are true; we all want to be remembered, and we’ll all be forgotten (though given society’s biases, some of us will have an easier time lasting longer in the memory than others). Finishing SOS, I thought about my twin sister, who died two years ago. Afterwards, the Department of Defense named a reasonably significant award after her (she helped run the military’s sexual assault prevention and response programs), and I felt pride that her memory will live on this way. But of course, in another ten years odds are nobody involved will have any idea who she is, and her name on the award won’t have any real meaning. And in another twenty, odds are that they’ll rename it again.

I also thought about a poll conducted in the UK 1929, about which authors would still be read a century hence, in 2029. Number one went to John Galsworthy, who’s now a footnote to history[1]; Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, and James Joyce were absent or near the bottom of the list.

What counts as enough of a legacy to be satisfied? And if the worm can eventually turn, who are the ones who are turning it? SOS doesn’t provide answers to any of this, but I’ll certainly remember it asking the questions.

1: He wrote the Forstye Saga, which as a person who’s read a lot of dead white males I only know because of a middling Masterpiece Theater adaptation from the early aughts.

Ooof. This is a tough one to get to grips with. Partially that’s down to the content of HTWAS: it’s a cut-up series of autobiographical vignettes mapped in achronological fashion upon a “hypercube”, which concern set theory, bipolar mania, creative partnerships, and a math-and-divination based project to facilitate universal love and cross-cultural understanding via ethereal communication with a Chinese pop star, all of which chaos is accessed via a parser interface with a minimal verb set whose only affordances are navigating the hypercube and combining objects that represent abstruse math concepts to form other, yet more abstruse ones (feel free to scatter parenthetical “?”s anywhere the previous sentence seems to be crying out for one).

The bigger barrier for me, though, is the opening text, where one of the co-authors says his relationship with the other co-author (which was also a romantic one, from the game’s context), has fallen apart after confessing to having sexual feelings for her teenaged son, who he’d apparently been a caregiver for over most of the previous decade. This is walked back almost immediately, but in a very vague way that indicates something significantly bad did occur:

"No, actually none of that was happening or going to happen, except the part where I, BenJen, am delusional and say horrible things to a teenager believing it will restructure the proton and give perpetual free energy via large cardinal embeddings, but actually I am just hurting the people I love, failing to manage my mental illness properly, and destroying my life and everything I have tried to do and be in the world."

This is of course something said in-game, and versions of both co-authors do exist in the story (which is similarly from the perspective of Ben), so it’s certainly possible that this declaration should be understood within the fiction of the game and doesn’t reflect actual events – as someone whose previous game was a memoir, I’m acutely aware that even in an explicitly autobiographical work there can be a significant difference between real events and what shows up in the game. But from playing through the game it certainly does not seem to boast much fictionalization; most events are low-key, quotidian ones depicting the co-author riding his bike around San Francisco, talking with his co-author about subjects including writing this game, and digging into his obsessive-seeming theories about what advanced math means about the nature of reality. Much of it’s also told in a writing style that I find really reminiscent of similar emails I’ve gotten from a bipolar friend of mine when he’s in a manic phase:

"The ball returns to your flippers and you shoot for an appealing target. The ball ricochets off the Communication Carousel and hits the Free Will Fork for a bonus. She continues, ‘Why is a Measurable cardinal special? If a measurable cardinal exists, it is the critical point of an embedding of the universe of sets to a transitive class, and the full universe of sets is larger and richer than L, the constructible universe. The existence of elementary embeddings depends on the self-reflectivity of the universe of sets, whether or not initial segments of the universe reflect properties of the whole. This is analogous to recursive self-containment of deities and universes and souls within the universes that contain the deity, as well as to the infinite mirroring of two minds communicating and modeling the other mind modeling the other modeling itself."

I don’t mean to be dismissive of what’s clearly a significant work, in terms of the effort it’s required and its significance to the co-author. And while it is very hard to make sense of much of the game – partially because I can’t follow the math, which might of course be perfectly comprehensible if you have the right background – there are some powerful moments in amongst the muddle. There’s a fantasy of playing the piano with great facility that’s counterposed with the lived reality of arthritis making such virtuosity out of reach, and conversations where the co-author shares his arguments with his partner but displays appealing self-awareness about the positive things he’s able to communicate but also the ways his enthusiasm or mania makes things more challenging for her. There’s interesting things to discuss about how the narrative – and the hypercube mapping – are constructed, as well as the binding mechanic and what it means in terms of the themes that emerge from exploration and the eventual option to “win” the game.

When I think about engaging with those things, though, I feel a coldness in the pit of my stomach, because it’s hard to treat HTWAS primarily as an aesthetic object when I can’t shake the idea that it’s the record of a person in the throes of a mental health crises who’s harmed themselves and others. It’s also unclear to me whether both co-authors agreed to put the game out in its current form, or if Ben has done so unilaterally after their relationship fractured. I’m not completely sure whether this is the right course of action for me, much less others, but I’ve decided to leave these notes on my reaction incomplete rather than doing a full review, and won’t be nominating it for ribbons. And I’ll also hope everyone involved with the game’s creation (especially the other co-author’s son) gets the help and support they need.

Computerfriend is hard to describe, but as I was searching for ways to communicate what it’s about, a shorthand popped into my mind and refused to leave: it’s Infinite Jest by way of Eliza. Despite how it sounds, this is not a stone-cold insult! What we’ve got here is a choice-based narrative, told in clever, literary prose, following a protagonist as they navigate their mental health issues in an alternate-history, mid-apocalyptic America (so far so Infinite Jest), which they do largely by engaging with a computerized therapist whose treatment strategies sometimes resemble madlibs (here’s the Eliza bit). It’s off-kilter and unsettling, with arresting images and meta jokes that are funny, but not just funny. Even though the ending I got didn’t quite feel of a piece with the rest of the story, I adored it anyway.

If I love a game it’s usually down at least partially to the writing, and Computerfriend is no exception. Here’s the first sentence:

"Six hundred wooden arms rise up on either side of the street black and warbling mirage in the terrible morning heat."

You had me at hello (the wooden arms are tree stumps: Computerfriend uses evocative language to describe the blasted pre-millennial environment of its setting, but it steers clear of surrealism). Here’s one more, from an early list running down some of the sensory input jangling into the protagonist’s overstimulated consciousness:

"3: The Constant Humming Of Air Conditioners Crouched Like Thieves On Open Windowsills"

Memorable images like this pop off the screen at regular intervals, grounding the reader in the protagonist’s intolerable status quo and providing a more than adequate rationale for them to be seeking refuge in the questionable bosom of a computerized psychiatrist. While the precise mental illness they’re dealing with isn’t spelled out – from a cursory knowledge of the medications you’re prescribed and a few of the therapeutic technics and analyses that get deployed, there’s at least anxiety and suicidal ideation – the protagonist’s experience of their life is assaultative and blanched of meaning all at once.

The game is structured around their repeated sessions with the eponymous program; after brief, conventionally choice-y segments laying out their daily life (mostly humdrum stuff around the house), you get a bit of therapy, then unwind by messing around on your computer. While even this last piece is interesting, including fun alternate-history headlines that relieve some of the misery of the rest of the game (“Jeff Bezos’s Grave Desecrated On Sixth Anniversary Of His Execution”; “Disgraced Magnate Donald Trump Attacked, Disfigured By Feral Ungulates At Cottagecore Animal Sanctuary”) and clever semi-interactive magic tricks that reinforce the idea that the computer is always ahead of the game, it’s the counseling where the game’s greatest heft lies.

The Computerfriend’s therapeutic persona makes for engaging play. All of its questions and statements are presented with a bit of an edge, and while it’s notionally trying to help you, it’s hard not to detect a whiff of the demonic in its approach. At first it primarily asks you simple biographical questions – some indicated by choice, others by typing in – and then spits out general platitudes that incorporate your replies in a cursory way (“I bet ‘writing’ is a great way to unwind”, it says, acknowledging your preferred hobby).

At first this is a dark joke, as the crappiness of the algorithm gives the lie to its claims of effectiveness. But the techniques quickly become more sophisticated, and the Computerfriend’s dialogue more naturalistic, sometimes in unsettling ways. Eventually it pushes you towards a breaking point, and possibly a breakthrough, and while writing an authentic catharsis is hard – much less writing psychiatric counseling that seems like it could prompt one – the author sticks the landing here, and I found the last therapy session really affecting, as the Computerfriend took on the protagonist’s anomie and proposed a postmodern, existentialist philosophy that could plausibly allow them to find meaning despite their emptiness, their loneliness, and the ruin of society.

Where the game didn’t stick the landing for me is in the actual ending I got (numbered 4 of 6, so there are others), which saw the protagonist fly away to an untouched wilderness and have a regenerative encounter with nature – this felt a bit too pat to me, and the pristine nature of the environment seemed at odds with everything I’d read about the chemical and biological ruin visited upon the U.S. It could be this is meant as a fantasy sequence, but even still, it didn’t feel all that connected to the choices I’d made through the course of the game (I should say, there are a lot of choices beyond the madlibs-y ones, largely around accepting, resisting, or reinterpreting the Computerfriend’s therapy).

Given the strength of the rest of the game, though, I found this too-pat ending easy enough to ignore, and after I’ve finished my reviews I’ll probably play again and see if I can find a different one that’s more fitting. And in the meantime, Computerfriend’s left me with enough indelible images that I won’t forget its dystopic, failed world – which is to say, our world – before I get back to it.

(Also, kaemi's review of this game is one of the best on this website; you should read it)

I’ve played and enjoyed a bunch of Andrew Schultz’s recent games riffing on board games, but have to confess that I’ve often found it harder to get into his wordplay ones; something about the pig latin one from a year or two back especially managed to melt my brain, despite recognizing that there was quite a lot of care taken to provide hints, tutorials, and other support to invite the player in. So I turned to this game, which is clearly anagram-focused (it’s a sequel to some older games that apparently have a similar concept), with an eagerness not unalloyed with trepidation.

Turns out I needn’t have worried – while I definitely had a few moments of struggle, Tours Roast Torus is an approachable set of puzzles, boasting a well-tuned level of difficulty, a sufficiently fleet play time not to wear out the concept, and some optional tough-as-nails endgame challenges for those who didn’t break a sweat getting to the end (I mean, this wasn’t me but I assume someone out there got through the core puzzles, cracked their knuckles, and settled in to have some real fun). There’s a bit of a plot threaded through which connects to those earlier games, and while I didn’t have much context for all the proper nouns, the setup is clear enough: antsy after your accomplishments in the previous games, you set out to explore a mysterious tower found in the middle of the eponymous torus.

Said exploration consists of finding an anagram from the prompt given in the names of each location along the torus. There’s a clever trick here, which is that each puzzle involves a word that includes exactly two of each word it includes, so it can be decomposed into a pair of smaller anagrams which make up the prompt. So like the prompt could be something like “stake takes”, which you’d read and then come up with – nothing, because I’m much less clever than Schultz is, but let’s pretend “askettakes” is a word.

As is typically the case with anagrams, for about half of these I looked at them and got them near-immediately, and half of them left me completely baffled. This is where Schultz’s trademark player-friendliness comes in; there’ll usually be a gentle nudge somewhere in the location text prompting you towards the answer, and if that’s not enough, the protagonist has a set of tattoos that tell you how many letters you’ve got in the right place, allowing you to trial-and-error your way to success (there’s also an advanced setting for the tattoos that provides even more information, but I couldn’t figure out how they worked). They’re largely reasonable words, too: there was one exception where I thought “hey, is that really a word?” (Spoiler - click to show)(HAPPENCHANCE), but at the same time I got that one after only two or three guesses so I think it plays fair. And in case your brain is starting to get tired of anagrams, there’s a well-calculated change of pace for the penultimate puzzle since it uses an entirely different mechanic.

With all these supports, it took me about a half hour to play through the main puzzles and solve the first of the bonus challenges (entirely by luck, I have to add), and then I poked around the post-game options for a few more minutes, since those helpfully tell you what you missed and lay out some fun rejected puzzle options. I found a few technical niggles – some of the text for the advanced version of the tattoos came out a little garbled, and they seemed to get confused by the endgame bonus puzzles (details in the transcript). But it’s all solidly put together, and the whole package makes for a nice, concentrated burst of wordplay that just about any player can have some fun with.

Roger’s Day Off wants to be a lark. A parser-choice hybrid, it has an entertainingly zany premise (use a time machine to do some historical tourism and collect a series of MacGuffins disguised as a tea service – the time machine is also a teapot, with a TARDISy bigger-on-the-inside thing going on) and puzzle-focused gameplay that doesn’t take its characters or situations too seriously. Add a fun authorial voice with some jokes that actually land – there’s a Cloak of Darkness riff that made me chuckle – and competently-done 3d images to liven things up, and you’d think it has all the ingredients it needs to realize its ambitions.

Sadly, though, I did not manage to have a good time with Roger’s Day Off. Some of this is due to awkwardness in the bespoke system, an underdeveloped world, and the way the heretofore-lackadaisical plot comes to the fore in the endgame. But largely it’s because the puzzles feel like they’re trying to check off as many of the crimes itemized in Ron Gilbert’s Why Adventure Games Suck essay as possible. There are instant deaths – including many puzzles that require dying to get the info you need to progress – puzzles that require out of game knowledge, and puzzles that seem to either throw logic out the window, or somehow invert it. Fortunately there are easily-accessible hints, and I can see a player getting some enjoyment out of the stronger parts of the game by using them early and often, but attempting to play the game straight was for me an exercise in frustration.

I’m going to be spoilery with examples of the kinds of puzzle shenanigans the game gets up to, so fair warning if despite everything you do want to try to flail your way through. Here are some of the worst offenders:

* At one point you meet a character – the concierge in a hotel – who asks your name. If you don’t lie and tell her your uncle’s name instead of your own, you’ll hit a game over (see, later on you find out she’s an undercover time police agent, and your time machine is registered under his name).
* Later on in that same 1920s sequence, there’s a drinking game where you need to maintain your faculties as long as possible and the solution is to drink the highest-alcohol stuff first, which is uh not my experience of how this works.
* Once you succeed in the drinking game, you make friends with a time criminal and have to try to get access to some contraband; you do this by suggesting he hide it anywhere except his boots (like, you need to click every other dialogue option and leave that one un-lawnmowered), and then he’ll hide it in his boots.
* Speaking of dialogue, almost the entire pirate ship sequence is a long conversation where just about every node has one good option and the rest instafail you, with no clear signposting on what strategies will work (OK, there’s one inventory puzzle that’s kind of fun).
* In the far future sequence, there’s a puzzle involving finding a FORTRAN bug – though at least the game has the courtesy to provide a link to a forum thread explaining the bug and providing the fix, making this puzzle either forbiddingly hard or completely trivial.

There are a few good puzzles in here – some inventory-based ones require you to do some present-day shopping and share the largesse with folks in history, which is entertaining. But for the most part it feels like progress requires either reading the authors’ minds or being OK with a whole whole lot of trial and error gameplay that’s at odds with the breezy vibe the game seems to be going for.

I found the game’s custom-designed system exacerbated these issues, since it’s fiddly enough to make repetition annoying. In principle I like hybrids between choice and parser approaches, since they can offer convenience and prompting via the choices while providing scope for exploration and surprise via the parser side of things. This one – dubbed “Strand” – mostly managed to do that, but there’s some sand in the gears. For one thing, the parser side of things feels underdeveloped, with very few pieces of scenery or places where poking around is rewarded, or even possible. On the flip side, though, most puzzles require typing commands that aren’t listed as options, so you can’t play just with the mouse. I also ran into some performance issues that slowed things down and made precise clicking harder, and had to manually scroll the game window down after most actions because the automatic scroll-down happened before the images loaded and pushed the last pieces of text off-screen.

All this frustration is a shame, because the range of settings provides some fun variety, and the gentle, idiosyncratically British humor on display in the opening is something I really enjoy (it’s in the same ballpark as Christopher Merriner’s games, which I love). Occasionally the it’s-all-just-a-laugh approach to worldbuilding feels a bit too slapdash – in the section where you travel to Assyria, which is basically ancient Iraq, you’re introduced to Sultana (erm) Nefertiti (double erm) who tasks you with killing a monster (erms again) who goes by Anubis (erm, hopefully not the real one?), and if forced to name a single element the disparate times and places have in common, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with something other than “ladies with pneumatic boobs” – but on the whole it’s pleasant to do some historical tourism and enjoy the jokes. If only the puzzles had been just as low-key!

Well, this is a funny one – funny odd and funny ha-ha. The premise of this one-room-parser game is, uh, slightly novel: as an insurance agent making a sales call at the castle of an eligible Baroness, you’re ushered into a waiting room where you’re encouraged to poke around – a slightly-askew portrait is the clearest jumping-off point, but you’ve got several avenues open to you, most of them leading to escalating farce.

(Oh, I just got why it’s named Wry. Clever!)

Certain actions, some of them non-obvious, will increase your score. Most such actions also serve to increase the protagonist’s libido, again sometimes in non-obvious ways – for example, trying to leave the waiting room to explore the castle will provoke a daydream of wandering into the Baroness’s boudoir, winning you two points. After a decent interval passes, the game ends, and depending on your score you get one of three endings, ranging from a minimally-successful one where you land the insurance deal all the way up to one where the Baroness responds positively to your erotic revenues and you wind up staying for breakfast.

Per the author’s note this is in some way inspired by a sketch or sketches by a German comedian, but without direct experience of any antecedents I have to say this is a pretty bizarre setup. And while things are kept PG-13, it can also veer into slightly uncomfortable territory; part of the joke is that the protagonist is a ridiculous horndog, but it’s still a bit icky to see him drool over nude paparazzi snaps of the Baroness (on a third hand, she’s presumably the one who left these magazines in the waiting room, so I suppose we’re meant to see her as inviting the attention. And in the ending where she’s not into the protagonist, that’s the end of it; sexy-times only commence when she opens the door).

With those caveats, though, I’d say that if you’re able to buy into the premise, Wry is an energetic good time. The writing is enthusiastic and happily goes off the rails before bringing things back to earth – here’s the aforementioned finding-the-Baroness’s bedroom daydream:

"You’d love to have a look at the chateau… What if you happen to find the Baroness Valerie’s bedchamber? She may be in the process of changing clothes? Or she is still lying in her bed? Naked?!? And then she says, “Oh Jon, I’ve been waiting for you all this time! Won’t you keep me company?” with a suggestive smile on her lips. Then the fantasy is gone."

There’s also some nicely-choregraphed physical comedy if you take the game’s invitation to fiddle with the out-of-true painting. Things escalate nicely, and every action you take to try to recover the situation is both reasonable, nicely clued, and inevitably makes things even worse. My only complaint is that the game ends just as things are reaching a fever pitch – I wouldn’t have minded a few more turns for further chaos to be unleashed. Pacing is always a challenge in this kind of game, but the author handles it well here, and every time the game ended I was eager to try again until I got the last ending. Blessedly, you also don’t need to wring out every last point to see it; if you complete the main thread and also discover a few bonus interactions, you’re able to see the protagonist make his breakfast date, so it’s up to the player whether they’re inclined to revisit the game to try out more abstruse interactions.

“You’ll like this thing if it’s the sort of thing that you like” is the mealy-mouthiest of critical verdicts, but that’s pretty much where I’m at with Wry – I can understand why some folks might find it hard to get into. If you’re able to get over that hump (er), though, the game can very much be a treat: personally I enjoyed it, and it’s definitely a well-designed and entertainingly-written piece of work, even if it might make me look askance at the next insurance salesman I meet.

Most of the Spring Thing games I’ve played so far have been relatively intense, so it was kind of nice to get another low-key entry after finished Orbital Decay. The Bright Blue Ball is a short, cute parser game pitched at IF beginners, and while its slightness, and slight wonkiness, means that it’s probably less suited for that purpose than other, more robust efforts to create a parser-IF gateway drug, nonetheless it’s a pleasant way to spend 15 minutes, with a few darker notes around the edges reinforcing how nice it can be to spend time in a safe place like this one.

Those darker notes are primarily about the situation that kicks off the action: this is the second Spring Thing game I’ve come across where you play a dog (the other of course being Custard and Mustard’s Big Adventure), and as the story opens you’re with your human “parents” as you flee your home due to a bombing alert – the resonance with the war in Ukraine seems entirely intentional. Thankfully, you quickly reach safety, but along the way you wind up losing your favorite toy, the eponymous ball, and the game consists of solving three or four small puzzles to retrieve it.

It’s always fun to play as an animal, and BBB does a good job of providing smell-centric descriptions and a robust SMELL command to allow for olfactory exploration. The protagonist’s canine nature also makes some traditional parser limitations more reasonable, like a one-item inventory limit that’s fair enough given that you have to carry things in your mouth. At the same time, I felt like the game sometimes didn’t go far enough to commit to its conceit: the first puzzle, for example, requires you to find a key and unlock a door, which is a good introduction to a common IF situation but makes for a bizarre mental image.

Speaking of the puzzles, they’re pretty much all of the medium-dry-goods variety, with one guess-the-action challenge thrown in on top. They’re all very heavily signposted, which is appropriate for the target audience, and feel satisfying to resolve. I did struggle for a bit with the first one, possibly due to some small bugs: I could smell something metallic in a table drawer, but after opening it the smell seemed to go away. I guessed that there was a key somewhere, which proved correct after I tried to TAKE KEY, but it hadn’t to that point showed up in the description of either the room, the table, or the drawer. Similarly, I was briefly stymied once I started wandering the city’s streets because one location had an unmentioned exit (for anyone else who hits a similar barrier: try going north). I also worried I’d made the game unwinnable when I solved the puzzles related to the little girl outside of the intended order, but despite the text seeming a little off-kilter it all eventually came right. As a final small niggle, X TABLE in the newsstand didn’t result in any output, indicating a missing description.

None of these bugs did much to impact my enjoyment – I usually wouldn’t list them all in a review, but since I don’t have a transcript I’m doing so in case it’s useful for the author. BBB is a fun, small game with a positive vibe that acknowledges that even when big scary things are happening in the world, small bits of kindness are important – maybe more important than ever (would that this message didn’t feel especially timely, given the state of the world). I enjoyed my time with the game, and would happily play (and test, if that’d be useful!) another game by the author.

For all that its plot hinges on a lone astronaut’s attempt to escape a doomed space station before it falls out of the sky, Orbital Decay is a surprisingly low-key affair. This choice-based take on a classic premise is distinguished by steering more into real-world plausibility than is typical (given how grounded the game’s tech is, I was surprised to learn the space station was orbiting an alien planet), but also by simple puzzles and a willingness to back-burner the imminent threat when there’s an opportunity to poke around its well-realized setting. This winds up playing to the game’s strong research chops – it’s fun to explore the station and read the various infodumps on how it should be working – but means the stakes and challenge felt reasonably low throughout.

I got a lot of enjoyment out of the game’s accurate rendition of NASA bureaucratese. After some early hiccups – the writing in the opening starts out a bit too wide-eyed (“The celestial heaven - an immense sea of black and stars, almost as if the uncounted fiery eyes of the Gods themselves were peering through the darkness”) and then overcorrects towards an overly-abrupt style when laying out the inciting incident:

"As an astronaut assigned to the COL (Crewed Orbital Laboratory) Bowman, you’re currently conducting a spacewalk to repair a failing AE-35 unit.

"Swiftly and without warning, the Bowman is struck by space debris. You survive, but the impact sends you spiraling into the vastness. Suddenly, you feel a violent recoil and realize your tether has miraculously remained intact!"

But once you’re back aboard the station, things settle down, and as you work through the puzzles, you’re treated to stuff like this:

"You’ve opted for the CEVIS pre-breathing protocol; before you can begin suit preparation, you need to perform exercise on a stationary bike while pre-breathing pure oxygen and then slightly depressurize the airlock to 10.2psi."

Maybe I’m a strange person, but I really like this! It gives a nice, grainy texture that lends novelty to a fairly played-out scenario, and if it sometimes undercuts the gravity of the protagonist’s predicament, I think that’s an OK tradeoff. The downside of this highly-technical style is that it risks bewildering the player by expecting them to have the same facility with jargon as the protagonist, but Orbital Decay avoids this by keeping the puzzles and obstacles quite simple to work through. There’s a pleasingly complex protocol required to move through an airlock, for example, but all the player has to do is click a series of links in order and enjoy the technobabble the game spits out. Similarly, there are a lot of different gadgets and items to find, but they’re pretty much all floating around in corridors, and with no inventory limit it’s easy to just grab all of them and then choose the usually-obvious options to use them appropriately.

I sometimes got the sense that the author realized that they’d streamlined things quite a lot and tried to re-add some complexity. For example, at one point you need to do an EVA to enter a damaged portion of the station from the outside, and have to make it across the gap. You have a large number of options to try, from using a tether to anchor you as you jump to using a fire extinguisher as an improvised propellant, but since you’ll have almost certainly picked up a jetpack that’s specifically designed for these kinds of situations as you went through the airlock, you’ll obviously want to just use that. Similarly, one of the options you’re given as soon as the game starts, when you’re still floating out in space, is to remove your helmet. It fleshes out the list of choices, sure, but having a “shoot self in face” button doesn’t really improve interactivity or add difficulty.

Also on the negative side of the ledger, I did run into some technical niggles, including a soft state-reset where after pressurizing an airlock, my choice to look around before heading onward somehow depressurized the airlock and put me back in my suit. Some text that probably should only fire once – like the protagonist musing “where is everyone” upon seeing the empty crew hub – repeats whenever you backtrack. And played on a phone, there are some misalignment issues that meant that some lists wound up mismatched, making the last “puzzle” (you need to pick a landing point from a list that includes an assessment of how well-suited they’re likely to be) harder than it was intended – though again, it was probably intended to be too easy.

Would Orbital Decay be a stronger game if it was harder? I think in some sense yes, the version that has timers, inventory limits, and more challenging puzzles probably does a better job of realizing the premise. And the low-key vibe extends to the ending, which I found pretty anticlimactic. At the same time, I feel like I’ve played a million games milking drama and challenge out of escaping a crashing spaceship, so playing one that leans hard into nerdy technical detail, where it’s no big deal if I want to ride an exercise bike or rehydrate a burger mid-crisis, made for a nice change of pace.

I don’t usually second-guess myself when I have a review that’s out of line from the main thrust of opinion on a game – different people are different, and having a variety of takes on a work I think is helpful for players and authors alike. At the same time, when I’m pretty much off on my one, and especially when I’ve got a more negative view than others have, it’s hard not to wonder whether the problem is me. And there’s probably no recent game where I’ve had more of these second thoughts than Autumn Chen’s previous game, A Paradox Between Worlds. While I admired the enormous amount of work that went into it, and found the character interactions at the heart of the game really well-drawn and engaging, the several metafictional layers atop that heart worked less well for me, and the Tumblr-mimicking gameplay which involved lots of highly-granular decisions felt exhausting. In the face of near-universal admiration for the game, though, I’ve gone back and wondered whether my lack of personal experience with the kind of fanfiction-focused communities it depicts led me to judge it unfairly, or if my real-life exhaustion (my son was about six weeks old when I played it) was what was actually making me feel tired.

The bad news is that NYE2019 doesn’t help me resolve that question; the good news is that that’s because it’s a much more focused piece that foregrounds the character work I’d already enjoyed in APBW, without any of the stuff that had turned me off. Add in a richly-detailed setting – the protagonist is part of a Chinese-American family at a party mainly attended by other Chinese Americans – and well-framed choices that create a high degree of responsivity and you’ve got a game that’s been a highlight of my festival so far.

The game opens with a bit of Tolstoy-biting – “every social gathering is horrific in its own way” – and mostly lives up to the melodramatic gauntlet it lays down. As Quiyi (or Karen), a college senior with social anxiety who’s suddenly thrust into proximity with a set of high-school friends and acquaintances she’s largely not seen for years – several of whom she used to crush on – not to mention the inherent awkwardness of being around a bunch of older adults who primarily see her as the child she used to be, the protagonist is facing landmines aplenty.

Fortunately, you’re given a lot of options to navigate this complex milieu. I’m not familiar with Dendry, but at least as the author has adapted it, the interface looks fairly ChoiceScript-y, but with the ability to scroll back up and reread recent passages and without the sometimes-intrusive stats. Your possible courses of action are well-framed, with a small bit of writing often providing a little bit of a preview for what might be in store. Here’s the opening set of choices for who you might want to hang out with or what you might want to do:

• Mom - She’s hanging around somewhere…
• Kevin Zhao - In the basement with the other kids.
• Wander around aimlessly - Keeping your head down…
• Food - The ever-inviting lure of snacks…
• Use your cellphone - First finding a safe location.
• Emily Chen - Sitting alone in an alcove…

The social interactions sometimes have fewer choices, and occasionally there’ll be a grayed-out choice that’s visible but unavailable, usually to denote that Quiyi’s social anxieties are constraining her, but even on a second playthrough I always felt like I had a lot of different ways to approach each situation. Despite all this freedom, though, the game actually has a tight structure – after a freeform opening, there’s a bottleneck as you sit down for dinner with the other young adults, leading to a nocturnal walk through the snow that may lead to a second open-ended section before things wrap up. It’s a canny framework, allowing for a lot of different paths through the story and making me feel like I was directing the story, while still making sure that there’s an overall shape to the narrative with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end regardless of what you choose.

Indeed, given the wealth of detail on offer, unlike the protagonist I had a lot of fun just exploring the party. I’ve been to a bunch of gatherings that aren’t too dissimilar in general dynamics from the one on offer here (though the specificity of this being a largely Chinese-American party was novel – I’m more familiar with being one of the token white guys at parties thrown by my Iranian-American wife’s family friends, or those of my South Asian- or Korean-American high school friends) and everything rings very true. The sequence where highly-educated lefties argue over the 2016 primary made me grind my teeth in just the way those actual conversations did, and on a more positive note the descriptions for the snacks were particularly good – the haw flakes sounded really appealing, and there’s some good character beats in just short asides on the presence of Lay’s potato chips on the food table:

"Anyway, these chips are for the kids, that is, you. Because the parents decided that ABC kids need their American snacks, or something like that. And well, you eat a bag full. Yeah."

Throughout, the writing is a significant strength, and while Quiyi’s narration is generally quite understated, this means there’s little distracting from the canny way particular details emerge into focus:

"You put on your jacket and your shoes. No one is watching you open the door. You leave. You’re free. It’s quiet. Snowflakes glisten in the air, shining under the streetlights. Your footprints defile the fresh snow."

My first time through the game, Quiyi mostly wandered around aimlessly, having a few haphazard stabs of conversation with her peers at dinner but otherwise spending time at the snack table, wandering aimlessly, and checking in with her (nice) mom and (standoffish) brother. Predictably, this led to an ending where her feelings of isolation and pre-post-college ennui didn’t move much over the course of the evening, even as it was clear there might have been other potential outcomes, or at least that other people were capable of achieving moments of connection. I though this late-game passage about her feelings of alienation and having let opportunities slip through her fingers making the inevitable let’s-all-take-a-bunch-of-photos-so-paste-on-a-smile phase of the evening all the worse:

"Someone takes a picture of Emily and Miri, smiling and hugging. You didn’t know they got along but somehow it makes you a little sad. Emily stops smiling for the photo with her parents. They don’t force her to smile. Come to think of it, you haven’t spoken to her dad all night, even though you worked with him before. Oh well."

It’s a flat recitation, but that gels with how I imagine she’d be retreating into numbness as a self-defense measure. I found a lot of pathos in this ending, as Quiyi’s failures felt like ones of imagination: as she wandered alone through the snow, she conjured up daydreams of difference sci-fi futures, but she can’t picture a conversation that goes well. If the story peters out rather than reaching catharsis, with her getting stuck in an extended moment of stasis despite her impending graduation, that’s fitting, and had its own kind of poignancy to me.

Except I should probably say my failures, rather than Quiyi’s, since this is only one branch the story can go down. My second play-through, I was able to help her to some moments of positive connection, including establishing a burgeoning romance with Emily. This set of scenes is also well-written – I found the awkward I-like-you conversation segueing into awkward but really amazing hand-holding very relatable, as well as the out-of-nowhere discussion of whether to have kids which is ridiculous for 22 year olds who haven’t even kissed yet to do, but seems completely plausible to me.

Ultimately though I liked my first playthrough better – there’s something inherently artificial about gameplay where you make the right choices and you get to date someone, and while there’s some funny lampshading of it, this plotline inevitably feels a bit more tropey and familiar than the one I first experienced. I’m not sure this is anything I would have picked up on if it had been the only narrative option on offer, though, so it’s more a matter of preference than an actual weakness.

My only real complaint here is that I think this branch might be too hard to get onto, at least on a first playthrough – having not played the prequel game, I hadn’t necessarily picked out Emily as a more significant character than say my mom, and since as far as I can tell opting to talk to her in the game’s first set of choices is necessary or at least very helpful for being able to strengthen the relationship later on. But playing as someone with social anxiety, first time around it made more sense to ease into the party by checking in with family, grabbing some food, etc., by which point I think that ship appears to have sailed.

I also have a note of caution. As I’ve been writing this review, I pulled the game up to double-check some stuff, and discovered that there’s a Status page that tells you how hungry or thirsty you are, your overall emotional state, and provides some background on the other characters that explains some stuff I had to dig to find out (like what’s the deal with your parents’ marriage) as well as displaying a numerical ranking for your relationships with each of them. I completely missed this when I played – I did so on my phone, which maybe made it harder to find some options – and while it the info it provides probably makes it easier to get together with Emily, honestly I’m kind of glad I didn’t know it was there, since the in-game exposition covers these bases in a considerably more deft way. So if you haven’t played the game, maybe steer clear of that page.

Anyway hopefully it’s clear that these are beyond niggly nits to pick. I’m really glad to have played New Year’s Eve 2019, and I’m glad I can now wholeheartedly jump on the Autumn Chen fanwagon.